Fire engineer advocates using lifts in emergencies

The changing demographic composition of the Australian population is having some extraordinary impacts — in the most unexpected quarters.

Take, for instance, the increasing incidence of obesity. According to one of the world’s leading fire engineers, the expanding number of obese Australians means that designers of high-rise buildings must now embrace the use of lifts, once rejected as a most unwise way out, in combination with stairs, during emergency evacuations.

In a recent presentation hosted by Fire Protection Association Australia in Perth, Peter Johnson, Global Leader of Fire Engineering for design and consulting firm Arup, also cited the nation’s ageing population and the ever-rising heights of commercial and residential towers as factors driving fire engineers to reassess the longstanding belief that stairways provide the only safe evacuation routes.

The use of lifts to complement stairs in evacuations has been shown to reduce the evacuation time of a standard 60- to 80-storey building by around 40%. Well-designed lifts can also provide good access for firefighters.

“Structural provisions for designing lifts for evacuation — such as redundant power supplies, lobby requirements, floors sloping away from lift openings and protection of lift controls — are well documented,” Johnson says. “Several buildings around the world, including Melbourne’s Eureka Tower, have already been designed with fire-resistant lifts.”

The challenge, Johnson contends, is not the technical expertise required for this new approach to building design, but the need for a complete re-education of building designers and occupants alike.

“For more than 30 years, we have been told that we should not use lifts when a fire alarm sounds,” he says. “Now we have to change people’s attitudes so they think of both lifts and stairs as being suitable for evacuation. New evacuation systems will only work if people are willing to follow the recommended emergency procedures.”

To help building designers predict this behaviour, Arup fire engineer Emma Heyes and the University of Canterbury’s Michael Spearpoint have been researching the psychology of evacuees and have found that building occupants are more likely to consider evacuating via lifts the higher they are off the ground. Their work has also revealed key concerns that people have about using lifts for evacuation, all of which will be vital for designers of evacuation systems.

Johnson has also called for an examination of minimum stair widths as part of a ‘paradigm shift’ in the safe design of high-rise buildings.